The Best of the Bad in 2007

What did readers have to gripe about in 2007? As per usual, plenty. But somehow the level of absurdity of the situations they found themselves in as customers of IT products seemed this year to reach an all-time high.

Getting broken products fixed under warranty seemed to be harder than ever this year. An Averatec customer, for example, was denied support for his notebook computer because the operating system had changed from the original configuration, even though the new OS was the Vista Express Upgrade Averatec had sold him. The owner of an HP notebook was willing to pay get his notebook fixed, but not the $1,000 to fix a broken latch that HP wanted to charge him. A reader with a defective video card was happy to find he could get a warranty replacement, until he learned he would have to pay an “RMA processing fee” that cost almost half the original price of the product. And one befuddled Seagate customer found himself of the phone with the warranty service tech drive having to take an oath that he would not use his replacement drive to build a nuclear bomb or to commit any terrorist acts.

One of the main issues that readers had to deal with this year was compatibility; or, more specifically, whether they as human beings were deep within their souls really and truly compatible with Microsoft’s Vista of the universe. Roxio customers were somewhat surprised to find that the “Windows Vista Certified” designation earned by Easy CD Creator 9.0 actually meant it would work with Vista “real soon” now. HP customers puzzled over why some older printers got Vista drivers while newer ones didn’t, while some SalesForce customers were aghast at the company’s seeming seeming indifference to incompatibilities with Office 2007. Funny thing, though — as the year went on, the Vista incompatibility gripes basically disappeared. It was if nobody cares about Vista anymore.

Sometimes it’s harder to tell which is worse — when the vendor’s rules are written in the tiniest of fine print, or when they don’t actually seem to be written anywhere at all. Palm hides the fact that some of its handhelds only have a 90-day deep in a confusing maze on its website. Microsoft isn’t even that obvious — only the fine print that its OEMs get to see states the policy that customers must get a new Windows license when they replace a motherboard. And sneakwrap language is showing up in other odd places, such as those legally useless confidentiality notices at the end of e-mails. In fact, back in April, one fool went so far as to propose a sneakwrap version of the U.S. Constitution.

But there were a lot of strange things going on in the digital world in 2007. Google decided that a Texas school district was going to be in Canada instead. A reader who closely checked his Verizon bill noticed that several charges were for unwanted text message spam, sent to him by Verizon. Amazon thinks the most secure way for you to log off from your account is to lie to them about who you are, while U.S. Customs thinks the best way to protect our borders from suspicious shipments from overseas is to require that the shippers use that most insecure of browsers, IE, to register on their site.

My own favorite as the baddest of the bad has to be Eaton’s Powerware for the lockout software it employs for the purpose of forcing customers of high-end UPS equipment to use its maintenance services instead of qualified third party service organizations. Even those of us who don’t buy millions of dollars worth of UPS devices lose in that deal, because Powerware forced the U.S. Air Force, and therefore taxpayers, to drop plans to get competitive bids on service contracts.

But you might have your own opinion about which vendor went furthest across the line this year. And next week as the year winds down, you’ll get the chance in my annual GripeLog poll to tell us all who you think was the Worst Vendor of 2007.

What do you think? Post your comments about this story below.